1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a semiconductor laser apparatus.
2. Description of the Background Art
With recent enhancements of the performance of personal computers and multimedia equipment, the amount of information to be processed has markedly increased. The increased amount of information has led to the development of optical recording mediums and their drives which can handle increased capacity and increased speed of information processing.
Semiconductor laser apparatuses are used, in particular, in optical recording medium drives which are capable of reads and writes from and to optical recording mediums, such as a CD-R (Compact Disk-Recordable) drive, an MO (Magneto-optical) drive, or a DVD (Digital Versatile Disk) drive.
In a light-emission device disclosed in JP 2002-230502 A, for example, a plurality of pins having electrical conductivity are provided on a support base which supports semiconductor laser devices. The plurality of pins, respectively, are connected to an n-side electrode and a p-side electrode in each of the semiconductor laser devices through wires. With this structure, when a voltage is applied between the n-side electrode and the p-side electrode in each of the semiconductor laser devices, a current is injected in an active layer which is formed in each semiconductor laser device, causing recombination of holes and electrons to emit light.
In the above-described light emitting device, however, a red semiconductor laser device that emits a red beam light and an infrared semiconductor laser device that emits an infrared beam light have a common n-side electrode, while the red semiconductor laser device and a blue-violet semiconductor laser device that emits a blue-violet beam of light have a common p-side electrode and a common n-side electrode. This makes it difficult to apply an arbitrary voltage to each of the red semiconductor laser device, infrared semiconductor laser device, and blue-violet semiconductor laser device independently.